


Dramatic Tyranny

by Icosagens



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman and Robin (Comics), Red Robin (Comics)
Genre: "Who says romance is dead?" -Tim Drake, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Background Talia al Ghul/Selina Kyle/Bruce Wayne, Bad Humor, Bruce Wayne is Lost in Time, Comic Book Science, Drama Drama Drama, Dysfunctional Relationships, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Fluff and Crack, Identity Porn, M/M, Melodrama, Mystery, Past Character Death, Soap Opera Drama, and then he kissed me
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-07
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-17 19:06:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28604943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Icosagens/pseuds/Icosagens
Summary: Two years after Bruce’s death, Tim is finally moving on; his embarrassing sabbatical to Eurasia to prove otherwise will decidedlyneverbe mentioned again. He’s reconciled with the closest thing he has to a family. He’s majoring in photography. He’s going to Steph’s apartment every week to quiz her on sets of increasingly menacing pre-med flashcards.Sure, it’s hard not having heard from Cass since the Daughter of Acheron incident, and sure, pretending he hasn't noticed Dick being chipped away at piece by cowl-shaped piece isn't exactlyfun,but Tim’s doing fine. He’s doing great. The fact that he’s slowly been drifting away from the Titans? Compartmentalized and handled. Damian’s recent foray into secretive, bizarre, and outright concerning behavior nobody will believe him about? Pshh, whatever.Everything would have stayed just peachy, had Jason Head never come to town.
Relationships: Stephanie Brown & Tim Drake, Tim Drake & Damian Wayne, Tim Drake/Jason Todd
Comments: 14
Kudos: 40
Collections: Detective Holiday Exchange





	1. Starbucks Crossed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ghoulaug](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghoulaug/gifts).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As it is, Steph is an absolute demon who’s gone just that little bit heavier on strength training lately, and uses a single arm to leave him dangling over the floor.
> 
> “Listen,” she says, “it’s a love story waiting to happen. ‘Devilishly handsome assassin and scrawny, pipsqueakish vigilante make out and then battle to the death’ has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy holidays, dear Abel :)! I decidedly believe this is not what you were expecting based on your exchange application, but I hope you don't mind. One day I'll read Tim's Teen Titans and Young Justice runs, and on that day I will write you TimKon. Until then, I'll hope that you were telling the truth when you said, "I love TimKon, but my first love was JayTim. The evolution of man."
> 
> If you noticed this fic seems like the setup for something longer, no you didn't.

What the world at large—re: not New England—does without Dunkin’ Donuts, Tim will never know. That’s a lie actually. He does. Mikel Coffee Company, Mugg & Bean, 85C Bakery Cafe. The list goes on. However, comedically effective deliberate ignorance is a Drake specialty, so Tim rolls up to 58A 5th Ave and E 87th St backseat on Steph’s monstrosity of a motorcycle every time with shades and the firm belief that his college-spurred foray into coffee has found its Hail Mary _on._

Typically on their morning beverage runs, Steph and he adhere to the tried and true, “shut up ‘til the sun comes up, buttercup,” because despite all appearances, neither of them are masochists. Today, however, they find themselves stewing in calcium-fortified silence behind a whole line of Karens. It’s apparently no longer cool to have respect for the shared quality of humanness in retail workers, because each of them, for various reasons, has taken no less than seven minutes apiece to dictate their orders.

Tim is about ready to either start miming Asshole No. 4’s histrionics to Steph or tear out his own hair. With said asshole in hearing range, option number two is looking more appealing by the second.

Steph, apparently, is not too keen on this.

“So,” says she loudly, yanking him toward her by the shoulder and spinning him around so her ponytail smacks his eyes. “You were insisting once again before you started drooling all over your textbook last night that demon baby was hiding something deep, dark, and dangerous from us all. What’s got you needing a rabies shot _this_ time?”

Tim blinks, with feeling. Steph levels him a hard look; the glint of the fluorescent lights bouncing off her eyes does nothing to help the impression. Exactly one of her eyebrows, visible even in their blondeness under the scrutiny of LEDs, is raised up to the vellus hairs crowning her forehead.

“So you can laugh at me?” Tim asks, extricating his shoulder from her grip. “I don’t think so. Come back when you actually start taking me seriously.”

With a sly curve of lip, Steph leans in, placing the heel of her palm on his nose. She leans in close, to the point where to any outsider they’d look like a young couple who has not yet figured out that PDA is uncouth.

“Oh, oh, let me guess,” she says, letting her voice do a frosting-pipette ripple into childish registers that leaves Tim wanting to dump a cup of coffee over her head. “You’re going to complain about his ‘imaginary friend’ again. You’re concerned because you don’t realize that children usually do this thing called maturing, and maybe he’s actually inviting real people over. That maybe he’s—and hear me out here— _learning to fit in with kids his age.”_

There is not a single thing that Tim can refute in that argument that either doesn’t coincide with circumstantial evidence, or start and end with, “I have a gut feeling.” Shoving Steph away and determinedly studying Asshole No. 5’s back rather than what is an entire new gleam to her eyes, Tim does his godly best not to let his face contort.

“I hate you.”

“You love me.”

“How can I love someone who bullies me relentlessly?”

“That’s a question for your therapist.”

It’s Tim’s turn to raise an eyebrow, and as the line inches incrementally forward, he tilts his head to let his gaze drift across the slope of her cheeks up to her eyes. She’s wearing mascara and just a touch of brown eyeliner, and the way it brings out life in the gauzy shade of her eyes is breathtaking. It’s moments like these that he almost regrets their best bros post-dating status.

“Actually,” Tim says, “I was going to tell you that he told me that I would make a good big brother, but if you don’t want to know about that I can—”

“Hold up,” Steph interjects quickly; he’s kind of bitter there’s not a hint of contriteness in it, but beggars can’t be choosers, “You should have prefaced with that, you big goon. Seriously?” She bumps him on the arm with her fist.

But that always passes, because objectively, empirically, and spiritually, there is no replacement for the quiet intimacies they share as friends that just didn’t _work_ while they were dating. Tim would miss the glimpses of teeth he can catch in her smile these days far too much.

“Seriously,” Tim confirms, shooting Asshole No. 5 the dirtiest look he can manage as she drowns out his voice in the denouement of her fit that Boston cream donuts are out of stock. Apparently, they’re her husband’s favorite.

“They’re everyone’s favorite, actually, Miss O’Malley, but we can’t always get what we want, so _sit down and shut up.”_

It takes Tim a moment to realize that this is not a particularly vehement thought, but something that has been said out loud, and another moment to realize that in fact, these words had come out of _his_ mouth.

_When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light / That split the night / And touched the sound of silence._

Hello darkness my old friend, indeed.

It is impossible for any Dunkin’ Donuts containing folk like those from Gotham City to ever go completely silent, but so much chatter has been shaved off of the top of the noise in the span of an instant that Tim feels his ears begin to ring.

“Holy shit, Tim,” Steph says reverently, and Tim finds himself taming a burst of affection for her at the realization that she has not, as many others would be wont to do, stepped away and pretended not to know him.

“Excuse me?” asks Patricia, whose name Tim was only sure of because of the ad nauseam reminders that had permeated his conversation with Steph that she was, “Patricia O’Malley, daughter of Titouan O’Malley,” and could and would, “leave a scathing review on Yelp,” that would, “put them in the red for a year.”

Excuse you indeed, Tim wants to mock, but the sharp pain in his foot à la Steph’s heeled boot spurs him to instead say, “That, uhh—” The pain sharpens tenfold. “—that was out of line of me ma’am. I apologize.”

It is this moment, this exact moment, Thursday, 13 May, 4:27:13AM, that Tim’s life is irrevocably altered. All considering, that’s not saying much, taking into account that the very epistemological truth that time is fluid means that irrevocable alterations take place every second. This becomes even more so true when it is realized that from the standpoint of behavioralism there are several other distinct, plottable points in his life from which stemmed new life arcs.

He will hold until the day he dies that all of that pales in comparison to this moment.

All considering, the fact that the entire duration of it consists of meeting the eyes of the barista behind the counter makes him sound pretty melodramatic. But—

OK, yeah, he’s not going to deny it.

The barista, saint he must be, has a name tag that reads, “Jason,” one that Tim is sure to take note of before he continues to stare at him, because Mrs. Mac and several formative years of galas had taught him _manners,_ OK? Saint Jason. He can work with that. Thin face, angular jaw, square chin. High cheekbones. And Tim means _high_ cheekbones. An undercut worn like he invented the goddamned thing, and neat eyebrows to match.

If Steph’s eyes are a breathtaking shade of blue, then Jason’s must be the equivalent in green. More so, actually, because it shouldn’t be natural to notice eyes in the the level of stringent detail that Tim had his. His thoughts on Steph’s, as much a hardship it is to admit it, hinge largely on his emotional attachment to her; this guy’s eyes are _something else._ If Tim didn’t know any better, he’d pin Jason down as Lazarus touched. He’s only ever seen eyes like that on three other people—four, if you count the watered down version Damian had inherited. Fractions upon fractions of a percent of the current human population, and yet that exact shade of green that is so clearly phosphorescent even in broad daylight slaps Tim across the face.

Said eyes are currently narrowed to the quick, a matched set with a scowl and the subtle twitch of jaw that indicated grinding teeth.

“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave the store,” Jason says.

“Leave the store,” Tim parrots, at the very same time it strikes him that if i looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck.

 _Jason the hot barista is a League assassin._ A League assassin so high up on the hierarchy, ostensibly, that he was permitted to take a dip in the pit. So either

  1. Ra’s has another child he chose to keep hidden from the world.



or—the possibility of auspices and horror,

  1. _Talia_ has another child she chose to keep hidden from the world.



Tim’s personally hoping for option number three, but beggars can’t be choosers, and his life is in danger every which way. Thus, he nods, softly, several times in succession, says, “I, uh, sure. Sorry,” decidedly ignores the satisfied nod and subsequent series of mutters on the dregs of humanity on the part of Patricia O’Malley, and goes to tug Steph by the shoulder so that he can leave the store.

“Nuh-uh,” says Steph, tugging herself away and planting her feet onto the ground, “I’m getting my coffee, thank you very much.”

“You’re kind of _part of my party,_ Steph,” Tim hisses, “which definitely implies that you’ve been kicked out too.”

Tilting her head and giving him the slyest scorn of look Tim has ever had the misfortune of seeing from her, Steph curves a hand around her mouth and turns around toward the counter to holler, “Yo, hot barista!”

Jason’s eyebrows shoot up into his hair; his lips press together and maybe Tim is just imagining things but it’s a look disturbingly reminiscent of one that Ra’s has given him many a time. God, he’s really starting to see it. The guy is racially ambiguous in a way that doesn’t exactly lean toward features typically associated with Talia’s Chinese and Egyptian heritage, but if he were to take after his father—

— _oh god, wasn’t three enough?_

“Yes, ma’am?” Jason asks, looking as if his eyeballs are about to pop out of his skull. Tim really doesn’t have it in him to apologize for Steph’s half-baked showman’s flirting. Instead, he concentrates on doing what he should have done _before_ he called out Patricia O’Malley and tries to become one with the floor.

“I’m part of Asshole McGee here’s party. Do I gotta leave too or am I good?”

“Ma’am,” says Jason, looking at a loss for words. His hand is clenching over the edge of the bar. It's calloused, and his knuckles are split and raw.

“You should call security,” suggests Patricia O’Malley, and that’s when Tim gets his shit together and moves to vacate the premises, nabbing Steph by the hoodie on his way out.

“See you never,” he calls over his shoulder, turning back one last time to catch a glimpse of—he doesn’t know, actually. It doesn’t end up being a fruitful one; he’s already turned around to begin preparing the next person in line’s drink.

As the door clutters shut behind him, Steph shoves him around and presses him into the brick wall, grinning so steadfastly that her noses scrunches up.

“So,” she says, “are you going to wait out here until his shift is over to get his number, or should I?”

Tim thinks the fact that his mouth proceeds to drop right into “gaping like a fish” territory is excusable, considering the circumstances. “Excuse me?” he asks, doing no part to free himself from Steph’s grasp. In fact, he—falls limp. If it were anyone else pulling him up by the straps of his sweater vest, they probably would have keeled right over.

As it is, Steph is an absolute demon who’s gone just that little bit heavier on strength training lately, and uses a single arm to leave him dangling over the floor.

“Listen,” she says, “it’s a love story waiting to happen. ‘Devilishly handsome assassin and scrawny, pipsqueakish vigilante make out and then battle to the death’ has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

“You’re a terrible friend,” Tim tells her, halfheartedly kicking at her shin from where he’s dangling. He catches a couple of people staring at him in the periphery of his vision. 

Move along, folks. If you wanted a circus you should have stopped Tony Zucco from making the Graysons go splat.

“I’m a great friend and you know it. I could have decided I was going to ask out League hunk myself, but here I am, leaving the playing field wide open for you.”

“I don’t even like guys that much,” Tim tries half-heartedly, but Steph levels him an awful look that leaves him shrinking even farther into the brick. He’s sure that all the scraping of wall against scalp isn’t great for his skull, but he’s not going to ask Steph to put him down with her lips pressed together the way they are.

“Tim,” Steph says, with all the gentle nudging of a mother shark.

There is no way Tim is going to let her finish whatever spiel is coming, likely involving the fact that several months ago Tim had knocked on her apartment door in tears and begged her to start dating him again, on grounds of, “I need to like girls I have to like girls and I’m positive I liked you once _please.”_

“OK, OK, he was hot!”

“Great,” says Steph, unceremoniously dropping him to the ground.

With much rocking from the balls of his feet to his heels and then back and a spread stance, he lands steady, but it is a _task,_ even with his training. 

“So you’re going to march back in there tomorrow and ask for his number, got it? Now come on, I still need my morning coffee fix and I’ll be damned if I don’t waste your coffee beans to do it.”

Tim chuffs, taking her by the arm and steering them both back toward Steph’s motorcycle. “Unfortunately for you, my friend, we don’t have a coffee machine at the penthouse. Forbidden on the grounds that the demon brat doesn’t approve of its cursèd properties.” 

“Don’t even try to tell me Alfred doesn’t have a percolator.”

“I mean… probably, yeah, but at this point, can’t we just go to Starbucks?”

Steph chuffs, breaking contact with him and striding ahead. He can’t see her face, and any number of the possible expressions that could be flitting across her face makes him glad for it. “For twice the price? I don’t think so, trust fund boy.”

“Twice the price for coffee that doesn’t taste like lukewarm water?” Tim inputs, with deceptive meekness.

“I will slap you, and I won’t regret it,” Steph tells him. Pulling out her keys, she clicks them, with feeling, and pulls her coat more tightly around herself as she kicks herself over the seat. “Hop right on back with your champagne taste and don’t talk to me. Honestly, you’re worse than—” She cuts off abruptly. As if Tim didn’t know her intent the moment the first word came out of her mouth.

“Bruce?” he finishes.

Reeling her breath in—taking her time with it, too—Steph puffs out her cheeks and leans forward into the handle bars. Tim takes back what he said earlier, about being glad he couldn’t see her face.

At least it means she can’t see his.

“Steph,” he tells her, “it’s been three years. It’s OK.”

“That thousand yard stare says otherwise.”

Duck your head. Stare at the sidewalk. The suggested distance between each sidewalk contraction is ten feet, universally. These ones look a little wonky. Of course they do—it’s Gotham City. Sticks and stones, they break these bones. Who knows how many times a rogue has bashed them in.

Tim does. But he’s not going to talk about that.

“If I was really that upset about death at this point I wouldn’t even be able to look at you,” he says. “I’m used to it, OK? People die; sometimes they come back to life, sometimes they don’t. You did. Kon did. Bruce isn’t going to. And neither is Jason Todd.”

Steph turns all the way around and gives him an incredible paragon of a _“What?”_ face. Question marks are all but visible halo-ing the length of her head.

“OK, I’m not even going to unpack that whole can of self-pity worms, because Jason Todd? Seriously? Where did _that_ come from?”

Tim. Stops. Physically, too, actually, for a moment. The feeling that his brain is being desaturated through a strainer becomes suddenly apparent. Not new; it is a nagging feeling that has only just become prominent.

“I—” he starts, but then he makes the choice to shut his mouth, close his eyes, and swing himself over the back of the motorcycle before he says anything else. It’s only when he has his arms wrapped around Steph’s waist—the dips between her ribcage and waist, the tense muscle that lets up just slightly at his touch—that he allows himself to continue speaking. “The guy’s name—behind the bar. It was Jason. I guess it… made me think of him?”

Despite Tim’s fervent finagling over the years, he had never actually _met_ Jason Todd. He _knew_ him, yes. Jason didn’t double knot the laces on his pixie boots for the first half-year of what would become two; a bad encounter with Mr. Freeze had changed that. He’d practice his quips under his breath between the tremulous moments of battle. When he made a large enough leap from building to building, he would pinch the corners of his cape between his forefingers and spread his canary-yellow wings. 

Even the most well-crafted of Tim’s photos, ones that would be worn around the edges had he not dedicatedly pressed them into albums, could not capture moments like these. He thinks, sometimes, that when he saw Jason, his eyes would be dotted with gleaming stars.

So yes, he _knew_ Jason Todd. But never in his life had he had the chance to tell him to his face that he was stupidly, wonderfully, perfect.

“Jesus Christ, Tim, the last thing you need is more shit to be sad over. Stop thinking about Jason Todd! Bad dog—no!”

“This conversation has been painfully ‘me’ centric,” Tim points out, and he thinks Steph knows that it is a deflection as well as he does, because that is the moment she revs up the engine.

“Get me some coffee and we can fix that,” she says, and then they’re off.

The Wayne Enterprises Penthouse isn’t actually that far from where they are. This part of Gotham is a strange amalgamation of opulence and poverty; spires of gleaming, expensive steel dot the streets like gumdrops alongside weary buildings with sagging shoulders. People collapse into dove-flocks of color behind them, and not ten minutes later Steph is tapping her fingers to a tune along the buttons of the elevator as they ascend the dozens of stories necessary to reach Tim’s temporary abode.

Really, Tim would have busted a lung laughing if two years ago someone said that he would willingly move back in with Damian, Dick, and Alfred; this is with as little offense possible intended toward the latest party. However, it’s—not horrible.

These are the people who are in his life these days, besides Lucius and Steph and sometimes Ives. The two Cassies? Kon? Haha. He’s over it. Friends and loved ones disappear and dwindle by the day. That’s life. But the hook of Dick’s smile, the one that catches the edge of Tim’s own lips in the sort of metaphorical sense that tugs them right up? Damian’s wild gesticulations in the high tides of his emotions, as frequent as ever under the light of his cruel moon? Each and every crease of Alfred’s face, ones that he has traced endlessly as they sit in the front room together and take tea? Are no longer things he knows how to live without.

The elevator bell chimes, and the doors part with a flourish absolutely uncharacteristic to machinery. Tim slips inside, quickening his steps only when he notes Steph’s behind him. Slipping along the walls, a habit he’s kept from living in well furnished homes even after years with Dick’s Spartan minimalism, he starts to head toward the pantry to suss out the ostensible existence of a percolator.

It’s only the clattering of pans that arrests him in his task. There is absolutely no one who should be home at the moment. Dick should be off world. Alfred was shooed off back to England for the month. Damian is to be celebrating his first Eid al-Fitr since his conversion from a childhood of atheism with old friends of Dick’s.

Damian is—home, pouring a bag of lentils straight into the pot.

“You know you’re supposed to check those for stones and dirt before you pour them in, right?” Tim is really on a roll with letting his mouth run, today.

Whipping his head around, Damian abruptly loses his grip on the lentils; the whole bag drops into the pot. _Splash!_ This is followed with a series of vicious curses in Tim’s direction that even years of games with Ra’s have only given him the basest understanding of.

Tim feels that his, “Fuck,” is distinctly underwhelming, and makes Steph’s giggled agreement with this sentiment his bane when he flips her off on the way to rescue the plastic from being boiled.

“Stand back, you cur! Your assistance is unnecessary,” Damian snaps, already fishing into the pot with a pair of tongs. Tim blinks, attempting to associate their sudden procurance with action, and finds the drawer directly to Damian’s left splayed open. There’s an envelope in it, Tim notes, tucked in between wooden stirring spoons and Alfred’s favorite spatula.

“Fine,” Tim says “Destroy all the kitchen utensils! Get burned! I love to see it!”

Snorting, Steph pops up behind him, and says, with infuriating verve. “It’s throw down time, boys.”

“I’ll throw _you_ down.”

“Don’t stick your nose where it doesn’t belong, _Fatgirl.”_

Their words mingle in the air, and Tim isn’t sure if they are even audible with their simultaneous nature. If they were, however, it wouldn’t matter. This is Steph, after all.

“I’m getting my percolator,” she announces, “but you two have fun.”

At this very moment, with a victory cry—which of course in all the auspices of al Ghul and Wayne genetics is beautiful and not at all ridiculous—Damian fishes the twisted bag of lentils and its dregs from the pot. He reels it back and then flings the bag into the air. It lands in the very center of the trash can, without a single lentil spilling to the floor.

“What the hell are you doing, Damian?” Tim demands, as Steph, unsurprisingly, does not leave to go find her percolator. “It’s five o’clock in the morning, and you’re making _lentil soup?_ Aren’t you supposed to be leaving to spend the day with the Ibrahims in a few hours?”

“I will not be going,” Damian informs him, pulling a spoon from the drawer and dropping it into the pot, with feeling. It puts the envelope into greater prominence; the ear of it sticks from the drawer. “I am perfectly capable of performing the tasks required for this day save prayer and volunteer work by my lonesome.”

Only half paying attention at this point, Tim peers over to get a better glimpse at the envelope. Alfred’s obsessive order in the kitchen would never permit it to live in this drawer, thus, Damian must have shoved it in. Beyond that, it must have been a hasty decision, as Damian was just as preoccupied with organizational tasks as he.

Call Tim nosy, but in that envelope there had to be something Damian wanted to hide, and Damian had been hiding a lot lately. He sidles forward, keeping his gaze deliberately aimed toward the bridge of Damian’s nose.

“So you’re just going to completely disregard an… entire family and their incredibly kind gesture?” he asks.

Even in his blurry view of Damian’s visage, Tim is able to see the downturn of his lips into a scowl, and the crinkle of his cheeks. “I am in no way disregarding their kindness,” he snaps. “I have called them and explained the situation. They understood, and wished me well. Not everything exists through your skewed paradigm, _Drake.”_

“Ohh, last names,” Tim says, making jazz hands as he inches ever closer toward the stove, toward the drawer, toward the envelope. “I feel so threatened.”

He opens his mouth to continue, but is halted in any and all facets of his journey when Steph nabs him by the back of his sweater vest and reels him back in.

“It’s OK to be sad that Dick isn’t going to be here to celebrate with you,” Steph says, “Tim can tell you all about being sad that your loved ones aren’t there with you on a holiday, _can’t you,_ Tim?”

Snatching her wrist, Tim presses the side of her face near her ear, fully allowing the revelation as to the nature of Damian’s plight to fly over his head in favor of what he considers a much more pressing issue. “Can we _not_ air all my issues with my parents out for the peanut gallery?”

“Can we not antagonize the not-so-tiny demon like a jealous seven-year-old?” Steph ripostes in a murmur. “I’m not your mom, but I seriously feel like it sometimes. I want my coffee, and I want to get out of here, and go to class, and watch videos of cats chasing little red lights while my professor shows us gross pictures of stratified squamous tissue. Cool your jets, buster.”

“I can hear you, you know,” Damian points out, clamping the tongs shut menacingly and sending them in one, neat arc toward the sink. Clanging directly against the drain, they make an awful clatter that has Tim suppressing a wince.

“Are you…” Tim feels as if he is swallowing a lemon, a phase he thought he was long over when it came to Damian. Today really is a day of revelations. “... seriously doing this by yourself because you don’t want it to be with people who aren’t Dick?”

“Of course no—” Damian starts, but then slams his mouth shut, clenching one hand on the edge of the counter and using the other to stir the lentils viciously. Steeling himself visibly, he looks Tim dead in the eye, then shifts his gaze to Steph, then looks back to Tim again. “I apologize, I misspoke. What I meant to say was: and if I was?”

“I—” Steph starts, but Tim elbows her in the ribs, probably deriving just a little too much satisfaction from that.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Dames,” he says, not even stuttering over “Dames” as a diminutive. “We’ll—leave you to it then. Eid Mubarak! Sorry I didn’t say it when we first walked in. OK thanksbyenow.”

Parodying the dearest Steph once again, he snags the back of her hoodie and tugs with just enough gusto to get his message across. In several long, unhesitant strides, he travels across the kitchen, outward into the eating area, and then travels toward the collection of bedrooms. He feels the ghost of Steph’s presence behind him, and with that, he slips a bobby pin into his bedroom door. Picking the lock, he cracks the door open just enough to remove the thin, clear string he had inserted between it and the doorframe.

It’s only when Steph and he are inside and it is safely shut that he turns around to speak with her. “Seriously?” he says. “You yell at me, and then you give him a copout like that just when I was getting close to figuring out what was going on?”

“Tim,” Steph says, clapping her hands together. “There. Is. Nothing. Going. On.”

“Yeah? Then what was _that_ about? You saw him. He could barely choke that out. Damian? Expressing genuine emotional vulnerability? Yeah, OK. The day that happens his grandfather will gift the scientific community a goddamned Lazarus Pit!”

Steph sighs, sitting on the edge of the bed and rubbing her temples with her thumb and forefingers. Just enough sun seeps through the one-sided paper coating the windows that it highlights the flaxen gold vellus hairs they touch upon.

“Fair point,” she concedes. “But also consider that what you’re doing is, one, a huge invasion of his privacy and, two, a gross overreaction. He’s fifteen, Tim. Whatever he’s hiding is probably normal teenager stuff. God knows we had our fair share of that. Tell me for one second that you didn’t keep things from Bruce and your dad.”

“Me moonlighting in green legging and a domino mask wasn’t exactly ‘normal teenager stuff,’” Tim points out, a little more sardonically than strictly necessary. “And you remember exactly what happened when he found out.”

“My example having a fallacy doesn’t change my point, Timmy boy. You’re being absolutely ridiculous. You were about to try and steal an envelope. _An envelope._ What could he have been hiding in one of those, honestly?”

“You don’t have to believe me,” says Tim, “but I’m telling you that he’s up to something. The last time he was acting this way Dick and I found out that Ra’s was blackmailing him into sending intel to the League.”

Steph sprawls herself across the bed, tossing pillows to the wayside as she starfishes outward. “OK, here’s what’s going to happen,” she tells him, patting the spot next to her for Tim to sit down. “I’m going to go back to the kitchen to find the percolator and start up a pot of coffee. While that is happening, you are going to open up your laptop, break into Dunkin’ Donuts’ servers, and skim any information about the mysterious Jason off of them that you can. By the time I come back, you should be an expert.”

Blink. Blink, again. Blink, a third time.

_“Huh?”_

“What?”

“Why would I do that?” Tim asks.

“I beg you this question: how are you supposed to fake date him if you don’t even know his full name?”

“Whoah, whoah, whoah,” he interrupts, decidingly not taking Steph’s invitation to sit down beside her. “Who said anything about fake dating?”

“Well you’re not exactly going to be able to get information about his life from a League assassin by tailing him. He’ll suss you out in an instant. You have to—” She pauses to shake her fist at the sky. “—get creative.”

It takes Tim an entire, embarrassing minute to parse through all of that. Established:

  1. Jason is a member of the League of Assassins.
  2. Jason is close enough to the League’s inner circle to not have been purged from the world after daring to take a dip in the Pit.
  3. Jason had the fortitude to survive a dip in the Pit; this is not an easy feat, considering its extensive history. 
  4. For some unearthly reason, Ra’s had thought to place his spy in a Dunkin’ Donuts, of all places.
  5. This new methodology was both startlingly effective and a face-heel turn from his usual activity. In all of his high intelligence, Ra’s established a particular pattern in his escapades that anyone of reasonably similar intelligence could begin to map out. That he was forging new paths was concerning.
  6. Back to Jason: his existence was likely a taunt made specifically to the Gotham City vigilante scene, based on the fact that there was a very small chance that his name was actually “Jason.” Seeing as Bruce was dead, Ra’s had likely been counting on Tim and Steph’s frequenting of this particular establishment to convey a message to the only other person such a name would touch: Dick.
  7. In this there exists the logical loophole that Dick and Jason weren’t actually that close, at least by Tim’s retrospective deductions. Perhaps that is what Ra’s is preying on, though?
  8. “You’re overthinking things again, Tim.”



_“Huh?”_ Tim echoes the him of five minutes ago, jolting from his reverie.

  1. Jason is _hot._



“Get to it, loser,” says Steph, instead of deigning to reply. Patting the spot she had cleared next to her instead, she rolls off the bed like some kind of paralyzed pillbug, dropping to the floor on all fours gracefully. She springs back up, offering him a lazy salute.

“I hate you,” Tim informs her, dropping into the spot she had vacated and puffing up his cheeks with air.

“No, you love me.”

“Go _away,”_ he orders, rolling over onto his stomach and snatching his laptop from the nightstand.

“I have done nothing wrong, ever, in my life,” Steph calls over her shoulder. She does, however, to all hallelujah, comply.

Tim sighs punching in his password with one hand and lazily flipping off Steph with the other. “I know this, and I love you.”

The door clicks shut, and his screensaver bursts to life in front of him. He does what Steph told him to. Eventually. She doesn’t need to know that he checked his grades first. Or took a peek at the news to bleach his brain from _that_ mistake. Or went back to the grades to do the same thing again.

But yes, eventually he finds himself with a blinking cursor and access to all of that beautiful, beautiful Dunkin’ Donuts establishment’s employee information. It’s not much work from there to find Jason. Jason Head, ostensibly, and oh boy if that doesn’t broaden these horizons to a disturbing degree. Tim would like to close his eyes again, thanks.

Ra’s isn’t even trying to hide anything. Said “Jason Head” can be directly linked to Talia Head, former CEO of LexCORP, with a sordid history of higher power in her father’s front companies. Legally, he’s her cousin.

It’s really then that it sinks in for Tim that Ra’s actually had another lovechild, because there is no way he would allow such an injustice as his name being misused to perpetuate otherwise. Damian has an uncle. _Damian has an uncle._

Which further brought up the inquiry as to whether Damian knew about this already; whether he had been hiding it. It would explain—a lot, including a potential correspondence involving that envelope. Ra’s is a traditionalist at heart, it wouldn’t be too far fetched that he’d ingrained habits of physical communication into his son.

Tim is already on his way to go confront Damian, Steph be damned, when he starts really getting into the meat of Jason’s life as per laid out by the employee database. He has a numerically round social security number.

Having anything to do with him this soon is a bad idea. A terrible idea. A _beyond_ terrible idea. Prudence would dictate that he frequented Dunkin’ for at least another two weeks during Jason’s shifts before he made any sort of more personal move. But something itches; it crawls up his spine and sends his nerves into tingling spirals. The sensation of being adrenalized, of being alive, is unmistakable.

OK, maybe he’s a little more on board with Steph’s idea than he had initially thought. This was finally his chance to get a one-up on Ra’s, maybe even put a dent in his plans ugly enough to stop him for a good long while. There’s this quiet part of him, one he tends to shove down, that gently taps him on the shoulder and whispers into his ear that he had been one of Bruce’s most stalwart foes, that doing something, _anything,_ to take him down was the best representation of his legacy there could be.

It’s during moments like these that his clutch on his mantra: “Bruce is dead, and nothing he thinks matters,” gets stymied enough that his judgement clouds.

Bruce is dead, and nothing he thinks matters.

In several deft clicks, Tim saves Jason’s phone number, home address, and other places of work onto a Word document. Without much ceremony after that, he squirrels his way out of Dunkin’s servers, and goes to dig into Jason’s other place of employment: a rec center at the edge of Gotham City proper.

He’s actually going to do this. He’s going to pretend to date a League assassin to try and weasel a plan out of him. He’s going to have to pretend that he has no idea the man he’s going to kiss wants to tear the lives of those he cares about to shreds for the sake of a berserk eco-extremist cult. This is going to be something. This is.

Tim feels his lips curling up into a grin as he pulls up the page for “Jason Head: Director,” on the rec center’s website. This is going to be something.

He’s in office today, Tim realizes: five o’clock PM. If he were to drive down there he could play the blushing stalker who asked after Jason in enough places to have tracked him down. Ra’s would have briefed him; it would be a very in character move for Tim to do something like this.

Of course, there was a risk of it giving away the game almost immediately, paying this close attention to Ra’s’ plant. But the best part about this was that even if he did, it wouldn’t matter. The guy wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. It would be the sort of battle for the wits that Tim had drawn himself away from the vigilante game to avoid in the first place. He could choke himself on stuff like this honestly. He’d drink his own poison and swoon in the mirror as he watched his intoxication.


	2. The Village People

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Damian crosses his arms, and oh, there goes the smile, he’s sticking his nose out at Tim now. “I am not a dog; you cannot speak to me that way. I demand my rights as a human being and your compatriot. However, this once I will show tolerance for your complete disregard of my heart, in favor of sharing information so that I can be free of your foul presence posthaste.
> 
> “Jason Head is the fruits of Bruce Wayne and my mother’s machinations, making him my brother, I suppose.” His face contorts, as if someone had just painted his tongue with sriracha. He opens his mouth to continue, however, Tim cuts him off right then and there.

Tim jots down the rec center’s address, pushes his laptop to the side, and then gets down and dirty to work on a paper for his philosophy class. He will not think about this until it is relevant. He will not think about this until it is relevant. If he repeats it enough times, it will become true.

And become true it does. The rest of the day passes in a blur. He explains his plan to a little-enthused Steph, trots behind her up until she dodges off for her Physics I course, and spends several hours wandering Gotham City U’s campus searching for inspiration for his photography final. It's a productive several hours.

At four fifty-nine on the dot—Steph can be infuriatingly punctual like that when she gets into some of her moods—they pull up in front of the rec center. Could Tim have driven himself and arrived at a decidedly less creepy, stalkishly time? Yes. Would he ever negate his and Steph’s attachment at the hip to do such a thing? Not in a million years.

“You ready to go?” Steph asks, cocking her helmet to the side to give him a once-over. She brushes her hand forward to rub at his cheek, likely adjusting the makeup that she had laughed at Tim’s insistence upon applying.

_“He’s going to know that I’m the kind of person who goes all out,” he had informed her. “If I go anything less than looking like it was my full and undivided intent to ‘seduce’ him, then it’s going to be a very disappointing few weeks.”_

_Steph hadn’t even deigned to respond with anything but a fit of laughter. “If you say so,” she had choked out eventually._

“Ready as I’ll ever be.”

“Good,” she says, pulling her backpack more tightly around his shoulders. “Now I’m going to go be a good girl and talk to Miss Kyle, see if she’s heard anything about whamstever the fuck Ra’s is up to through the criminal grapevine.”

It takes Tim’s brain several seconds to make the connection from “Miss Kyle” to “Selina, femme fatale and former lover of Bruce’s.” He finds himself coalescing as he attempts to process this.

“Since when did you know Selina?” he asks, tapping one of his feet over the ledge of the sidewalk. Buh-duh-bah, _bah-dah-dah-dah._

Scoffing, Steph deliberately and dramatically flips her hair over her shoulder. “I don’t know everyone in the capes community through you, you know,” she tells him.

“What can I say,” Tim sallies, “I’m a chauvinist at heart.”

“My favorite misogynistic pig.” Slinging herself back over the seat of her motorcycle, Steph gives him a lazy salute and a half-cocked grin. “Best of luck to you, lover boy.”

Tim, tracing the edges of her face with his eyes in more of a fond sense than he’s comfortable with, feels his lips turning downward. “I’m nobody’s lover boy,” he insists.

“Tell that to your clone boyfriend,” Steph says, letting the engine roar to life.

 _“What?”_ Tim demands, flushing to the very roots of his hair; this only deepens when she completely ignores him in favor of driving away.

Steph, apparently, either enjoys rubbing salt in the wound, or hasn’t gotten the message through Tim’s many mournful nights waiting for the three dots that will never come to manifest in reply to his weeks old messages to Kon.

Probably the former, honestly.

For the record, it’s not Kon’s fault. Tim will die on this hill. There’s—a lot going on, and that’s that.

It still gets his heart going like smushed putty every day that passes by with no correspondence. If Tim didn’t know better from the eye he keeps on LexCorp, he’d assume he was dead.

Whenever, wherever, whatever. Apparently, Timothy Jackson Drake has bigger, Ra’s al Ghul-shaped fish to fry. He steels himself, and looks up at Jason Head’s ostensible place of work. It’s an odd, obvious choice to have him play the altruism card, and once again he finds himself scratching his head as to what could, one, be the source of Ra’s’ face heel turn and, two, what the actual contents of that face-heel turn entail.

Running a hand through his hair and mussing up his part, Tim heads to the single, rusting metal door, propped open by a decrepit, feeble cinder block. It would be hard to isolate this as any sort of community hub; he wouldn’t have noticed it himself were it not for his active searching for directions. He’s almost hesitant to touch it, not out of disgust but out of the sense that he’s about to tread on sacred ground.

The day Tim allows senses like that to rule him would be the day he could no longer qualify himself among anything near an adroit vigilante. He pokes his head inside and hedges the door open just enough to slip through.

He’s not sure what he was expecting, but what he receives is a narrow hallway with walls splattered to the nines with colorful paints. Upon further scrutiny, it’s artwork, ranging from literal kindergarten finger painting to whorling scenes that wouldn’t be out of place framed in a living room. The floors are flecked with these same paints, more highly concentrated near the walls but sprinkling outward in such a way that gives Tim the sense he’s going to be wading through cupcake frosting.

As he makes his way forward, he almost feels like a child playing games with the sidewalk cracks in his endeavors to avoid stepping on these splotches of color. _Step on a crack, break your mama’s back. Step on a line, break your daddy’s spine._

Tim, unlike most first timers here, has an advantage: he had used a combination of a low-quality map he had procured on the recesses of the rec center’s website and a quick dip into their security feed to pinpoint Jason’s office. He carefully ducks around several doors that he hears noise emanating from, and has a close call with what looks like an art room which is bared naked to the world.

Finally, however, he reaches his destination. A door even more enfeebled than its entrance predecessor, there is a piece of paper tacked over chipping paint that reads “Custodian” that says, “Director.” Even the tape ensuring its cause is peeling, and looks as if it's run one too many marathons. There’s an inescapable sense that if he touches this door, the entire framework of this building will collapse.

It is probably a bad vigilante move to open this door without taking several insurances and precautions.

He throws all of that to the wayside and presses his way inside. There is a reason Dick’s been doing his damned best to kick Tim from the streets lately.

The first thing he notes is that his observation skills have apparently taken a sharp dive out the window at some point, as there is a hushed conversation going on between a white-streaked figure he immediately recognizes as Jason, and a boy who looks to be about fifteen. Quiet, but something that should have been audible from outside the door.

“... your mom,” Jason is saying, but it’s not three seconds later that he’s glancing up to shoot Tim the sort of glare that needles right into his flesh and stirs it around for fun. He tilts his head, ducking into the peripheral vision of the kid, and makes one, sharp gesture back toward the door with his right hand.

“You really don’t need to worry, Jason,” the kid says, not even turning backward. Tim wonders if he’d even seen the exchange. “I’ve got it handled.”

Leaning back in his chair, Jason bears a smile, inviting with just the right hint of savage to all hell for those who were looking for it, and makes another vehement motion, with his head this time, toward the great outdoors.

“It’s my job to worry, Ty,” Jason tells—Ty, apparently—this all while vivisecting Tim with the power vested in him by his cornea alone. “We’ve gotta figure something out here, dude.”

Ty shuffles around a bit, fists clenching, then unclenching, then clenching again. They gradually make their way up to hug around his middle, and that whole, “sacred ground” feeling comes back to whale Tim over the head with a dumbbell. Jason’s glower increases tenfold.

Directed toward him, of course. 

Jason’s gaze falls back to Ty for a moment, going just that shade of soft that has Tim itching within himself, because Ra’s has taught this guy manipulation skills in the spades. He never affords anyone that kind of thing. He never afforded _Damian_ that kind of thing. And yet here Jason is, with those eyes and that mouth and a head’s angle of incidence that is far too kind.

The woman who birthed Jason, she really must be—have been? have been, most likely—something special.

“One second,” Jason tells Ty, adjusting his body, finally, to face Tim fully. “Hello, sir,” he says. “Is there something I can help you with?”

Ty tilts to the left, ever so slightly, ever so inquisitively, before whipping around in full to get an eye’s worth of Tim.

“Hello, Mr. Todd,” says Tim, standing tall, not giving an inch under the wrath of his very being ripping to shreds under Jason’s scrutiny. “I was hoping I could speak to you?”

“I’ll be happy to talk with you after Tyler here and I are done speaking, Mr. Drake, but would you mind waiting outside for now?”

The boy of the hour, now dubbed Tyler in his entirety, gapes like a fish as his gaze roves over Tim.

“When did you get in here?” he asks, demands, louring and shoving his hands into his pockets.

“Ty,” Jason warns, in all of the hypocrisy of his current acerbic visual hold on Tim.

“Just a minute ago,” Tim answers, honestly. “I barely heard a thing.”

Despite giving him a long, good eye, Ty’s stance loosens slightly; he slumps, and inches ever so closer to Jason’s desk.

“Maybe you should talk to this guy now, Jason.”

Tim recovers quickly, but does not succeed in stopping the slight part of his mouth at that. He whacks his beating heart several times over, into abject submission. He’s a vigilante. He’s Red Robin. He’s faced down everyone from Killer Croc to Jeremiah Arkham. One of Ra’s’ lackeys, no matter how far in the inner circle, shouldn’t have him swallowing several times a minute and pressing back on his tongue.

“I can wait,” says Tim, “it’s really OK.”

“No, I think Ty has a point. I think we should talk now, little stalker of ours.”

Tim’s entire muscular system ossifies. If he had any doubts as to his theories, as well-backed as they were, before, he certainly doesn’t now. “Great,” he says, slapping on his best megawatt grin. “We’ll only be a couple of minutes, Tyler.”

For his part, Tyler is showing admirable restraint, he thinks. He’s not sure what that “deer caught in the headlights” expression is for, but it has to be something good. “K,” he says, not taking his eyes off of Tim for a second.

Jason pushes back in his chair, and braces his hands on the desk to stand up. Waving Tim toward the door with a much more modest gesture than his earlier fare, he slips past his desk and toward the exit himself. 

Tim finds himself drawing a blank when it comes to getting his limbs to obey him.

“Well, you coming?”

Tim allows his head to bob down, and then up, and then down again. “I’m coming,” he says, and with no ceremony after that, follows Jason outside.

As soon as the door clicks shut, he rounds on him.

“How the hell did you find this place,” he demands, arms already wide to the side in some wild beginning of a gesticulation. “You know what—you know what, actually, I don’t even want to know. I know who you are.” Jason pauses, before reaching forward to grasp Tim by the shoulder, pulls him so that they have no choice save a very deliberate and ugly denial to lock eyes. “You’re Tim Drake. That dead billionaire’s ‘ward.’”

Tim can _feel_ the quotation marks around “ward,” and isn’t sure he wants to even begin to dig into what that could mean. It’s clearly some facet of the act, but _what_ is beyond him.

“I’m Tim Drake, that dead billionaire’s ward,” Tim echoes. “You know, I’m surprised. It’s usually _my_ name people don’t remember. ‘You’re that ward boy, Bruce Wayne’s, right?’”

 _"'That dead billionaire’s’_ name doesn’t bear repeating,” Jason informs him, grip tightening around his shoulder _ever so slightly._ “But don’t try to change the subject on me. What are you doing here, and _what do you want?_ Do you know how much trouble I got in for that little debacle at Dunkin’ earlier? Because the answer is _a lot,_ pretty boy.”

“Pretty boy?”

“You’re seriously taking the wrong point. Are you being deliberately ignorant or are you actually that obtuse?”

Tim scrubs a hand over his forehead, shuffling. Finding himself repressing the urge to bite his lip, he instead meets Jason back in the eyes. His scathing eyes haven’t softened any, but there’s less intensity in them, this time.

“Listen,” he says, “I’m sorry about that, OK? I wasn’t thinking.”

“Damn right you weren’t,” Jason ripostes. “You seriously bothered to go off on a dime-a-dozen Carlotta. That’s kind of pathetic.”

It’s really beyond Tim’s help that he’s unable to stifle a snort until it’s already halfway formed.

“You mean a Karen?” he asks.

Jason’s grip loosens on his shoulder, and his faces becomes dusted with just the smallest sparkling of pink. It kind of makes Tim want to flush himself. “Yeah, a Karen. Whatever. You’re getting me off track again. Answer my question before I bodily throw you out onto the streets and laugh when your steam-pressed ass gets covered in dirt. You know goddamned well that no one is going to stop me.”

“I—” Tim starts. Now comes the hard part. Breathe in, breathe out. Brace your shoulders, but not enough to be visible to the naked eye. Don’t make the mistake of steeling yourself. Remember that you don’t actually like this guy and that he seeks to dishearten and destroy the lives of everyone you love and the world at large. “I actually went looking for you because there was something I wanted to ask.”

Over the years, Tim has learned the hard way that those on the wrong side of morality are, in fact, real people; no matter how much some of their actions make them seem like soulless demons, they can still act perfectly ordinary. Get into arguments with strangers. Pull on that whole indignance cloak and wear it with distinction. Quip. Laugh. Love. It almost makes their actions more despicable.

Jason is so perfectly _normal_ that it makes Tim want to tear out his hair. There’s not even a hairline of a peek into a break in character, the slightest inkling that he has a personal mission involving him. It’s—impressive. Horrifyingly so.

“You went through all the trouble of tracking down me, a total stranger, just to _ask me something?”_ he asks, squinting at Tim; he actually draws his hand back. Pushes his head forward and scrutinizes him with decidedly less embittered derision than he had been previously.

“Yup,” says Tim, popping the “P” with burlesque distinction. “I did.”

“You know what?” Jason says. “I’m morbidly curious enough at this point that I’m going to entirely disregard how creepy you’re being and let you continue.”

Hey batter batter, hey batter batter swing. Ready up. Time to strike. “See, I have a—proposal?—for you.” Say the words, Drake. “It seems like—“ Tim barely manages to choke out this next part. It’s for the mission, he tells himself. “—your milkshake brings more boys to the yard than anyone could reasonably handle.” 

He. Actually just said that.

Too late to stop now.

“I,” Tim continues, ticking up a grin that looks exactly as mortified as he feels, ”can help you take care of that problem.”

Jason, whose face up until this point has been expressive to great pains, goes blank as a sheet of paper. There’s not a single crease crossing its geometry of tissue and bone. One. Silence. Two. Silence. Three. Silence.

Abort mission. _Fuck_ Steph, and abort mission.

Four. Silence. Five. Silence. Si—

“Are you asking me out?”

Bluster. Right. Fool the League assassin. Tim knows how to do that.

“And if I am?” The words crawl from between his teeth, no better than a whimper. 

Alvin Draper. Caroline Hill. This is no different, Ra’s’ secret lovechild be damned.

If he tells himself that enough times, maybe he’ll even believe it.

“Then you have exactly five seconds to get out before I whoop your ass,” says Jason, and Tim really should have been preparing for that one. He’d had his heart set on the “Jason wants to spy on Tim as much as Tim wants to spy on him” route,” which in hindsight had been injudicious at best and myopic at worst.

_Bluster. Right. Fool the League assassin. Tim knows how to do that._

“Will you give me thirty so that I can make my case?” Tim asks, and he seriously hopes that Jason can’t see his smile ticking at the edges.

Who is he kidding. Jason can totally see it.

“One,” Jason starts, and Tim just cuts him off right then and there.

“Look, we both know you’re not actually going to bodily throw me out, so if I can be a creep for a little while longer and slip you my phone number, there’s really nothing you can do to stop me. Tear it to shreds once I leave, if you want, but you’re still getting it.”

Not waiting for a response nor a reaction, Tim reaches behind him to slip a packet of sticky notes from his backpack, then filches a pen from behind his ear. Plus one and ten digits later, he’s holding out painstaking blue scrawl, deliberately leagues—no pun intended—more legible than his usual fare.

“Take it,” Tim says, tossing his head and setting his jaw unmovingly. Imaginably, he looks statuesque. Pin this moment in time to the wall like a butterfly’s corpse. In beauty we trust, in beauty we preserve.

Jason looks at him, lowly, pulling in on his lip for far longer than five seconds. Then, with no ceremony, he snatches the paper from Tim’s hand.

“Fine,” he says. “But now the ball’s in my court, and I say we’re going to play a game. I call it, ‘which thing doesn’t belong here?’ It’s pretty self-explanatory. Let me know when you figure it out. Chop, chop. We’re on a deadline, here.”

“You sound like a B-list villain. Peak comedy, really.”

Louring, Jason taps two fingers to his wrist, once, then twice.

“I’ve overstayed my welcome, I get it, I get it. I’m going. I’ll see myself out.”

Shoving the pad of sticky notes back into his pocket, Tim stops himself from physically breathing out a sigh. Instead, he braces himself in all of the relieving ways he hadn’t permitted himself earlier. He flashes Jason a pair of finger guns, and a wink. Overkill? Probably. Call him vindictive, but the incredulous cringe of Jason’s face is oh so sweet.

He’s turning around when he hears it.

“Hey, stalker boy?”

Pausing, but not looking back, Tim carefully tilts his head.

“I don’t know anyone by that name,” he says. “Think you may be looking for someone who already left.”

One beat. Two. Three, four, five. It takes twenty to realize that Jason’s not going to respond. Despite himself, Tim peeks over his shoulder.

Where Jason had once stood, there is only empty space. There, and then gone, with nothing to his name. Like his namesake, sort of. 

Ladies and gentlemen, let the seventy-sixth Hunger Games begin.

Tim waited outside the rec center for an entire five minutes before he made the determination that Steph wasn’t coming. A ridiculous determination, at least to anyone who didn’t know her.

The next hour, in precession, goes like this:

  1. Tim walks over to Selina’s latest home; her habit of sojourning makes her hard to track down, at times, but in the spirit of candor: Tim keeps an eye on her. You can never be too careful with a criminal of her caliber. Sometimes she gets this gleam in her eye, one that was most frequent in her times around Bruce. Sometimes Tim looks at her, and he sees Bruce’s large, steady hand draped over her shoulder.
  2. Tim arrives, lets himself in without ceremony; there’s no point in formalities, at this point. It’s just in time to catch a good glimpse of the fresh hickeys dotted along her neck and the burgundy lipstick smeared on the corner of her chin.
  3. Tim, embarrassingly, takes a half hour to be coaxed down from the notion that Steph and Selina had been making out, despite the fact that Steph’s lipgloss had been cherry pink. Spoiler alert: they had not been making out.
  4. Tim ruminates for another hour as they take dinner together over the fact that Selina, whom he had never seen with another since the death of Bruce, had purportedly found another to take solace in. He proceeds to get smacked about the head by Steph with no warning and told summarily to stop being a selfish prick.



And that was it. That had been the night. He showered. He brushed his teeth. The whole shebang. Settling in the bed, he pulls out a notepad and his macroeconomics textbook to get ahead on notes—God knows he needs it—but finds it’s only minutes later that he’s migrated to the bottom of the page to make something new out of the rubble of his previous plans. He still hasn’t given up hope that Jason kept the number; he’s far too familiar with human nature for that. However, the road not taken is still one that must be observed. Thus, he perseveres. 

Arrows here, feedback loops there, and he’s starting to build himself a pretty nifty diagram of the information he’s collected on Jason. It’s determinaly impossible for there to be no truth within his mockery of a “normal dude” charade. Tim finds himself flipping through his mental catalogue of some of his more vibrant expressions in order to attempt to unveil something, anything.

It’s when his pen starts drooping in his hand that his phone buzzes. Tim leaps about a foot into the air, before giving his brain a quick kick to the prefrontal cortex. The last thing he needs is to get his hopes up. Steph. Dick. Ives. Lucius. Steph. Dick. Ives. Lucius. Don’t do it, Drake.

Beginning in the process of squeezing his eyes shut before forcibly ripping them open once again, Tim taps out his password. He does not allow himself to hesitate before clicking on his messenger app.

It’s an unknown number. All it says is, “Testing.” Yes, with the period and the capital “T.”

It’s completely logical to assume that it is Jason at this point. Tim sucks in a sharp breath.

> 1, 2, 3

When there is no response after a minute, Tim forces himself to put the phone down. He rips the page with the, in retrospect, frantic scrawlings of his deductions and their consequences out of his notebook, and forces himself to return to the actual task of the hour: studying.

Several minutes pass. He’s just starting to enter the zone, actually, when his phone buzzes again.

This is Tim Drake? <

> This is your FBI agent.

? <

Tim is starting to get the impression that Jason may just be, possibly, kind of sort of maybe, out of touch. It’s really no wonder considering how isolated a cult like the League is. In his experience attempting to map out their practices, he’d discovered that those who lived in the League compound actually got their internet access limited. Outside agencies were relegated to the painfully indoctrinated and those without a soul.

He’s starting to get a sense of which one Jason is, and oh _boy_ the last thing he needs is for this to be harder than it’s already going to be.

> you’ve never heard a big brother joke?

Big brother… like in the Orwellian sense? <

> the meme-ified version of it.

Since when was a groundbreaking social satire meme material? <

Seriously, what happened to planking? <

> LMFAO

? <

Tim has an inkling that this “question mark” thing is going to become a regular event. It makes him want to bash his head into a wall. Pru most definitely hadn’t been like this; just how sheltered had Ra’s kept this not-so-kid?

> you… weren’t joking, were you

You know, this really isn’t the way to go about talking to the guy that you just asked out. I could block your number anytime. <

I’d still sleep like a baby. No skin off my back. <

The confirmation that this is actually Jason goes right and bashes Tim across the nose; he almost gets the urge to physically wince. He’d been going off of this basis, of course, but his bait had actually taken to the hook, and more than that the prey had taken the bait.

Still, for himself, he has to make this unequivocal.

> WAIT i’m sorryyy please come back Jason

I dunno; you’re not really making a great case for yourself. <

And thus, the man has acknowledged that he is Jason Head. Thus, they’ve trekked onto a whole new face of the square. Tim uses the hand he doesn’t have his phone resting in to rip his planning paper toward him with a sharp jerk, before unceremoniously crumpling it. He proceeds to send it in an arc toward the trash. Though it hits the rim, it gets the job done, making its way inside.

> will I look like a better catch if I tell you I’ll take you out for ice cream?

Not going for the typical “first date restaurant” rigamarole is not actually a gamble, considering the strings both Jason and Tim are pulling, however, Tim still finds himself tapping at his leg vigorously while he waits for a response.

Depends. <

Oh boy.

We’re both buying for ourselves. And you’re not allowed to judge me for my taste. <

Tim finds himself stifling a snort. OK, OK, he can work with this.

> your taste must be pretty bad if you’re worried about me judging you for it. ice cream is hard to get wrong, my dude

Those are the words of a man preparing to judge me. <

This—is ostensibly an agent of Ra’s agenda. _This._ So sure, it’s been a day, but he’s finding himself appraising Jason beyond looks in that time. He’s got a sense of humor and a vast—if potentially fake—expressiveness, if nothing else. Tim is starting to doubt even that, however. Why put all the effort up into keeping a character like this, if there was no necessity for it?

> i judge everyone i like. take that or leave that ;)

Well that’s a little forward of you. <

> i tracked you down to your place of employment in order to hand you my number. it doesn’t get more forward than that. you’re either going to learn to love it or you can go and shred the paper

My very own Wesley. I’m swooning. <

> wesley?

You get on me for social unawares, but you don’t know The Princess Bride? <

> is that the you killed my father prepare to die movie?

... <

You’d better hope that ice cream is really good. <

> believe me it will be

> you ever been to petirroso’s?

There is a dip in the conversation, when Jason does not respond right away. A minute passes, then two. Not very long, actually, but enough to have Tim jiggling his leg.

That ritzy place near town hall? <

> you totally stopped to look that up

So I’ve never been rich enough to wander into that section of town. Sue me. <

It’s way too obvious of a chance, but Tim isn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

> that makes it sound like you’ve lived in gc for a while

> u a local?

That’s a can of worms you really don’t want to open. <

Too soon.

Call it a fifth date kind of question. <

Shouldn’t we be saving these kinds of questions for that, anyway? <

> fair

> you free tomorrow afternoon? 5?

“You totally stopped to look that up.” <

You have access to my schedule, don’t you? Creep. <

> i’m a weirdo

> what am i doing here

> i dont belong here

Is that a Radiohead reference? <

> oh so you do have recognition capabilities

> *jazz hands* i’m impressed

So I got one pop culture reference wrong and now I’m a caveman? <

> yes

There is another pause. Several minutes, this time. Tim tells himself he should go back to his homework. He can’t let this Ra’s debacle take over his life. Last time he allowed a task to consume him. Well, they don’t talk about that. And believe Tim, Dick has tried.

I’ll see you tomorrow, stalker boy. <

It’s not a very hard decision to leave Jason on read. It’s an even easier decision to bury himself in schoolwork. Nothing better than hours upon hours of pontifical essays and fervent studying to make Tim’s heart stop beating like a bass drum. In the nerves way, not the lovey-dovey way, he’d just like to state for the record.

The night slinks by at the speed of light, if light were chained down and running sans kidneys. Eventually, at three am, Tim slams his laptop shut, pushes his phone away to repress the urge to scroll back through his conversation with Jason; after realizing that he can’t actually do that because has to _charge_ them, he keeps his movements efficient and doesn’t allow his eyes to track.

It takes far too long to fall asleep, and isn’t even worth it when he wakes up the next day with Damian looming over his face, bringing back a whole slew of problems involving an entire different breed of al Ghul. When Tim had returned the previous night, the kitchen had been wiped clean, not a sign of his lentil soup debacle in sight. The envelope had been stunningly absent from its previous place in the drawer.

Unfortunately for Damian, not even the musky candle left lit on the counter could cover up the miasma of cooking that went far beyond one dish. At the time, Tim had been too jacked up on a Jason high to pay it much attention, but this morning it all comes back into stark relevance.

“There’s... lipstick on your cheek, Damian,” Tim says, his voice still bleared with sleep. It’s a soft burgundy, and complements the tone of his skin with deft grace. As his vision clears, it comes into sharp clarity, a crescent moon pressed just underneath his malar bone.

_What the hell is this kid up to?_

“Stephanie said that you were seducing a member of my grandfather’s League,” he says, glowering at Tim, looking startlingly reminiscent of a porcupine with the gelled spikes of his hair and his beady, narrowed eyes.

“Steph said _what?”_ Tim asks, scrambling up so quickly that he smashes his head against the headboard. Damian darts backward with deft grace in order to avoid becoming collateral damage, and Tim has never more wanted to smack him across the face.

“Stephanie said,” Damian enunciates, “that you were seducing a member of my grandfather’s League.”

“Yeah, no, I got that part.” Tim caves to the urge to rub at the throbbing of his skull, burying his other hand into the depths of his covers as he grabs a fistful and squeezes. “The thing I’m having trouble with is that you and Steph apparently had an actual conversation concerning not only private details of my life, but details of a classified mission behind my back.”

Damian doesn’t even blink.

“Stephanie and I talk about more than you would presume. For all of her buffoonery, she has a quick wit and a sharp mind. She found it prudent to share this information with me so that I could act as third party intervention, if necessary, as well as in the hopes that I would be able to share more information with you about ‘Jason Head.’”

Tim breathes: in, then out, then in again. Then he repeats the process. Encore. Encore. He cannot allow himself to lose control. He will not bow to the urge to stoop to the level of a fifteen-year-old.

“OK,” he says. “OK. Steph and I are going to have a long talk, but I can live with that. Now, are you going to make yourself useful and tell me about Jason, or are you going to get out of my room and let me wake up?”

Even with his presentation of two options, Tim’s fingers itch for his notepad. Instead, he clutches onto the bedspread harder, studying the ups and downs of Damian’s face. He looks—Tim has known him long enough to differentiate his current facial expression from the typically universal “ire.”

That is the expression of a Damian trying to bite down on a smile.

Asking what, exactly, the point of humor was would be futile, so instead Tim taps on the side of his wrist, where a watch would be.

“I have class today, Dames,” he says. “Chop, chop.”

Damian crosses his arms, and oh, there goes the smile, he’s sticking his nose out at Tim now. “I am not a dog; you cannot speak to me that way. I demand my rights as a human being and your compatriot. However, this once I will show tolerance for your complete disregard of my heart, in favor of sharing information so that I can be free of your foul presence posthaste.

 _“Jason Head_ is the fruits of Bruce Wayne and my mother’s machinations, making him my brother, I suppose.” His face contorts, as if someone had just painted his tongue with sriracha. He opens his mouth to continue, however, Tim cuts him off right then and there.

“Wait, your brother? As in, your biological, 100% brother? Bruce has another kid? _Talia_ has another kid?”

“Since when were you so concerned with a genetic attachment creating family ties?”

“You’re avoiding the question,” Tim snaps, more viciously than he had intended, and once again that awful not-smile ripples across Damian’s face.

“If you did a DNA test, Jason Head would have the Lazarus flowing through his veins,” Damian confirms. “Honestly, do you really think my grandfather would allow one to bear his name who was not worthy of it?”

“I think your grandfather would do a lot of things if it was a means to his ends.”

“Well as you may believe to know him,” Damian says, “You do not know him as I do. I presume, actually, that the person closest to his disposition that you have broken enough bread with to help you make a parallel is my father.”

Tim swings his feet forward, and stands up, brushing shoulders with Damian as he rights himself.

“Nope,” he says. “You can shut your mouth right now, because we are not going down that road.”

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less travelled by, / And that has made all the difference,” Damian mocks, using his hands like maws to make accompanying gesticulations.

Snorting despite himself, Tim shoves several necessities into his backpack, doing his best to put on his favorite blasé “I’m not even going to spare you a glance” cloak on. Eyes sear a line along his spinal cord, and he breathes through the burn.

“Ooh, Robert Frost. Should I be scared?” Tim asks, clutching a hand to his chest as he slings his bag over his shoulder.

“Save your fear for the day I sic Rumi on you,” Damian tells Tim, as he heads toward the door. He’s closely followed; this at least eliminates the possibility that his entrance and “information” was a ruse to rifle through Tim’s stuff.

Still, later that day, when he’s preparing for his “date” with Jason, he catalogues the state of his room and the set of systems he has in place to make clear when his belongings have been rifled into—not that he’s stupid enough to leave anything of true value out for anyone Damian to find.

It’s untouched, save for one oddity: the “time-travel-indicative” painting Tim had insisted on sequestering away from the Manor into his closet was no longer slipped between the gaps of two cubby boxes. Despite Steph’s belief that it was kept as a measure to facilitate self-flagellation being erroneous, Tim allows the charade to continue in such a way that no one would dare take it from him. Even Damian knows that the painting is forbidden territory.

Tim for the life of him cannot create a plausible scenario in which he would have taken it. Still, discovering the source of its loss is a more fruitful task then primping in front of the mirror for the fifth time, so he endeavors to take it up.

Jeans and a tee are fine, he tells himself. There is absolutely nothing wrong with jeans and a tee, and no reason he should be concerned anyway, as due to the nature of their “relationship” there is no chance of poor clothing choice causing Jason to play gone with the wind.

According to Dick, pacific blue brings out his eyes, which are in equal accordance his best feature, so it is guaranteed he will be fine.

Stare into my eyes, pretty boy, so that you won’t look into my soul. In all of its melodrama, perhaps it will lend him some aid.

So only twenty minutes before he has to leave to make the walk to Petirroso’s, Tim finds himself skulking around his own house in hopes of procuring his painting once again. He makes a mental checklist of rooms as he goes through them. Foyer? Clean. Kitchen? Clean. Dining room? Clean. Et cetera, et cetera.

He systematically makes his way through every room in the house, only to find the purported knowledge that he would only find his answers in the one room he was most hesitant to touch bubbling within his beautiful but misfortunate synapses becoming more likely by the second.

With five minutes to spare, and fifteen minutes of stalling to mull upon, Tim stands in front of Damian’s door. It is no different from any other door, in theory, however its lines seem Spartan and unyielding in ways that the rest of the house eschews. Were Tim one to believe in auras, he would call Damian’s “eau de katana.”

Tim doesn’t even bother to determine what kind of anti-trespassing measures Damian had slid into place amongst his door and belongings, slipping inside and walking through the room with no regret.

Despite having not been in here in months, Tim can’t note a single change for the entire first three glance throughs of the room. It’s only as he goes to check behind the dresser for his painting that he notes that the dresser is, in fact, now blocking the door to his closet.

When Steph finds out just how right she is, he is going to relish the look on her face despite the inevitable accompanying punch to the arm that’s just a little too hard to be in good fun. But as he goes to push aside the dresser, he notes something else: there is something glinting atop the pin-straight, hospital-tucked bed covers. Tim thinks it’s a sword, at first, and pulls out his phone accordingly to document evidence of rule-breaking for Dick when he returns, but as he approaches he notes first the small, rotund nature of the objects, and then the dazzling array of green gemstones encrusting them. 

It’s jewelry. More specifically, a necklace, several bangles, and one ring with a large topaz rock making its bed in what looks to be real gold.

There had been a lipstick smear on Damian’s cheek this morning, Tim notes to himself, once again. It takes new relevance now, and while his conclusions boast the most drastic of solutions, considering this is Damian they are talking about, they are undeniably plausible.

Option the first is that Damian has a lady friend he has been sneaking around with. It would explain the twitchy behavior, his insistence on spending Eid al-Fitr alone, and the typically female-associated articles all in one fell swoop. The pieces interlock so perfectly it’s almost sin.

There’s only one problem with that: once again, this is Damian they are talking about. Despite Steph’s insistence that he is maturing, he is still largely isolated from his peers. Granted, the causality of this has shifted from self-imposed, inflated hermitry to the cruelty of high school bullies, but the point still stands. Tim would chop off his own foot before taking this answer at face value.

His second, and more versatile conclusion is that Damian is either exploring his gender expression or gender identity. Likely, considering his staunch principles and adherence to stereotypical American customs, he would only succumb to the more drastic latter option. It would, albeit more hazily, also explain his twitchy behavior, as well as a lack of desire to be around real people for extended periods of time out of—shame? dissatisfaction with how he was being perceived?—which would result in both talking to himself and mulishly powering through his own Eid al-Fitr.

The one thing that deduction left untouched was the enigmatic envelope Damian had taken such pains to hide. That, if nothing else more, indicated the involvement of a second person. But, once again, there was absolutely no way that Damian had either a friend or a lady suitor.

The burgundy lipstick smeared across love bites on Selina’s neck nips him tantalizingly on the tip of his thought processes.

What would explain both of those scenarios was their common factor: Steph.

Tim is about ready to storm around and grab either Damian or her by the shirt collar when he feels his phone buzz in his pocket. Stumbling, he yanks it from his hoodie, letting out a curse he is going to proceed to pretend he never said.

There is a “one” on the message app, and he doesn’t even need to open it to see who it’s from. He doesn’t open it, actually, because he doesn’t want to see any sort of questions about being stood up.

Instead, he makes a direct dash for the elevator, not even bothering to cover up his tracks on the way out. Damian has just been shunted down several notches on his priority list, because the man who’s apparently the kid’s older brother has strutted his way right on to number one.

Not going to think about that right now. Tim is not going to think about that right now, because call him an idiot but there being more blood of Bruce’s in the world, that was—

Not going to think about that right now.


End file.
